Keith Hammer: From a Big Impact to Eternal Impact

Keith Hammer: From Big Impact to Eternal Impact

Meet IC Coach, Keith Hammer.  Keith is a seasoned organizing leader with experience as an executive pastor, church strengthening strategist, ministry coach, and corporate executive. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and a Masters of Divinity, coaching certifications with CoachNet and Intentional Churches, and is a certified facilitator for StratOp and Lead Like Jesus. His passion is to equip and encourage others to achieve maximum effectiveness and high impact growth.

IC: Tell us how your experience at Circuit City prepared you for ministry and serving churches?

KH: I learned a ton during the 11 years that I spent as the Director of Corporate Systems for Circuit City during their high-growth period that directly applies to a growing church context.  Flexibility and adaptability were an absolute must along with a continuous pursuit for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of all systems.  One of my primary responsibilities was to keep an eye on the big picture of the information flow and the successful integration of all processes as we served the needs of the various departments while protecting the achievement of our overall corporate goals.   Close collaboration between the different functional areas was essential and we played a key role in that.   There was also the need to continue to identify new solutions to solve the ongoing challenges that such a fast growing business environment creates, which often meant continuous learning and ongoing training with emerging technologies.  The good news was that we were never tempted to get 'married to the past', but the bad news was that there was no rest for the weary!  With a staff that was rapidly growing each year as well, there was also a great ongoing need to identify, recruit, and develop new leaders and to effectively delegate as much responsibility as possible to them while providing them with the support that they needed in order to be successful.

IC: What have been the highs and lows of serving churches through the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware?

KH: After having served as the Executive Pastor at one church for 14 years, serving as a Strategist for Church Strengthening for our network of close to 600 churches during the last 2 years has given me the unique opportunity to serve and impact a much larger base of churches over a much broader geographic region.  Getting to equip and encourage such a diverse group of ethnicities and language groups represented by our churches is a great blessing and a 'touch of heaven'.  At the same time however, the diversity of church sizes, styles, governance, and overall health of the churches that we work hard to successfully serve creates a very challenging context.

IC: How did you become a part of IC?

KH: I became aware of IC as a result of my prior relationship with Doug Parks, the co-founder, when we were both serving as Executive Pastors.  Kevin Odor, the Lead Pastor at Canyon Ridge Christian Church where Doug was serving at the time, had been my college roommate and had connected the two of us.  Over the years I grew to greatly respect Doug's gifting and effectiveness.  After learning more about the StratOp process, choosing to becoming a part of the IC Team of highly seasoned and Gospel-centered executive pastors provided the greatest potential for maximizing it's kingdom impact.

IC: Share some wisdom or encouragement you have learned from being in the trenches of ministry.

KH: Humility is not thinking any less of yourself, just thinking of yourself less often.  It's amazing how much more can get accomplished when it truly doesn't matter who gets the credit.  True servant leaders lead by example and never ask others to do anything that they are unwilling to do themselves.  Another important mark of a servant leader is that when things are going well, they look out the window at others, but when things are not going well, they look in the mirror at themselves.  Maintain a teachable spirit and make a commitment to remain a lifelong learner.  And always remember that you are never as good as 'they' say you are during the good times nor as 'bad' when times are tough.